Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization

* Book: Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.

URL = http://www.theupsideofdown.com/

Review

Fencer (fencer.wordpress.com) [1]:

What Happened to Ancient Rome?

"Homer-Dixon’s touchstone for the understanding of what happens to civilizations is ancient Rome and its empire.

The book opens with a meditation on the incredible sophistication of Roman building techniques and what sustained the Roman way of life.

The Roman empire’s extensive networks of roads and aqueducts allowed the generation and collection of the energy that sustained it: the transmutation of the sun’s energy into food and agricultural products.

As the empire became more and more complex and as it extended ever outward, this energetic network that underlaid its might became over extended and began to break down.

This brings us to the first of a number of useful concepts that Homer-Dixon introduced to me: energy return on investment (EROI). This is a concept in common parlance by experts in today’s energy debates, and it describes the ratio between the amount of energy a project or process produces by the amount it consumes. An EROI of much greater than one to one is necessary to run a society.

In Roman times, 2000 years ago, Roman farms were organized as large plantations worked by slaves and oxen.

Calculations about the amount of energy it took to raise a hectare of wheat, for instance, must also include what it took to feed the laborers during the times of year they weren’t in the field. It turns out that the EROI for Roman wheat was about 12, and for alfalfa, about 27. They invested the energy equivalent of one bushel of wheat to get 12.

The efficiency the Romans developed, and the agricultural energy they gathered, allowed them to sustain the largest city the world would know until nineteenth century London.

Then a combination of stresses combined which led to the empire’s farmers abandoning their land, taxation no longer availed as much, the EROI declined precipitously and the system, and the empire, became vulnerable and started to fall apart.

So what? you might say. That’s really ancient history. Homer-Dixon contends that our societies are, like the Romans’, becoming steadily more complex and more rigid. The stresses building inside our world are all linked to the stupendous energy demands our societies make upon the world. The high EROI we depend on is no longer so easily attainable." (http://www.theupsideofdown.com/pdf/20070726-quirk.pdf)

Stresses To Shake the World

"Homer-Dixon identifies what he calls five tectonic stresses.

– population stress: overall increase and the difference in rate of increase between rich and poor countries

– energy stress: increasing scarcity and cost of conventional oil

– environmental stress from mounting damage to land, sea and air

– climate stress as the atmosphere responds to global heating

– economic stress from the widening gap between rich and poor people within countries and between countries

All of these are heightened by globalization in the broadest terms: the huge scope, connectedness and speed of all human activities and impacts, from disease to terrorism.

Civilizational collapse probably won’t occur due to any one of these stresses, but what Homer-Dixon calls synchronous failure could easily lead to catastrophe.

“What happens, for example, if together or in quick succession the world has to deal with a sudden shift in climate that sharply cuts food production in Europe and Asia, a severe oil price increase that sends economies tumbling around the world, and a string of major terrorist attacks on several Western capital cities? Such a convergence would be a body blow to global order… .”

Ecology of Forests as Civilizational Model?

"Homer-Dixon provides a model of civilizational change and a possible way through in his examination of ecologist Crawford “Buzz” Holling’s panarchy theory, an idea which has its origins in the ecology of forests.

There are adaptive cycles by which forests survive. And not just at one level but over a hierarchy of adaptive cycles at different scales, a hierarchy which Holling calls “panarchy.” He believes this theory is meaningful not just for forests but for all complex systems over time.

I will refer you to the book for the details of the model, but the key concept seems to be that of resilience: that part of the system that resists deep collapse across several levels of adaptive cycles. And these adaptive cycles aren’t just physical but also psychological:

“Panarchy theory also helps us better understand another critically important phenomenon: the denial that prevents us from seeing the dangers we face. Our explanations of the world around us - whether of Earth’s place in the cosmos or of the workings of our economy - move through their own adaptive cycles. … Our explanation moves through something akin to a growth phase: it becomes progressively more complex, cumbersome, and rigid; it loses resilience; and it’s ripe for collapse should another, better, theory come along.”

And how might some other, better, theory come about? Homer-Dixon offers what he calls catagenesis: the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.

From the point of view of those with a vested interest in the status quo, efforts to manage our problems can actually be a useful diversion: such efforts provide a focus for academics, politicians, consultants, and NGOs, while in practice nothing changes.

There are immense risks of course. At a “moment of contingency”, in his language, when great danger and opportunity arise as some crisis sweeps the globe, there will be opportunity for choices that could not be made before. Of course, the worst of the human race, the ruthless, the greedy, those who manipulate the politics of us and them, may prevail."

Four Actions To Avoid the Worst

Homer-Dixon outlines four actions so that the best might instead have a chance: reduce the tectonic stresses to lower the risk of catastrophic collapse; cultivate a “prospective mind” to cope better with surprise; boost resilience of critical systems such as food and energy networks; and finally, prepare to turn breakdown to advantage because it will occur.

I’m reminded by what I once heard the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson say: it all depends on the rate of bad news. Too slow, and change will not be taken seriously. Too fast, and all hell breaks loose.

This four point list includes both the most fruitful concept in the book to me, resilience, and the most fuzzy one, prospective mind.

Prospective mind is described as a new attitude to adopt that greets the inevitability of constant change and surprise. This is not a managing mind, which is bound for failure, but an imaginative one that can implement real and radical solutions.

One has to be in favor of this, although it sounds like a jazzy form of positive thinking in some respects. I’m not sure what it means exactly. I fear it doesn’t address the depths of what’s needed. A new kind of spiritual stance is needed, not only a thoughtful one.

Resilience, now, that means something to me. A resilient system is not necessarily always economically efficient — often not. As Homer-Dixon alludes, it is characterized by individual elements that are extremely diverse, by decentralization of problem-solving and decision making, by being open to enough instability to allow unexpected innovations and yet orderly enough to learn from successes and failures. Resilience is adaptive. The Internet for instance takes on some of those characteristics.

Homer-Dixon describes the world’s need: the economic-growth-at-all-costs imperative of capitalist society giving way to a resilience imperative where dynamic sustainability can take place, rather than a one-way race to the bottom." (http://www.theupsideofdown.com/pdf/20070726-quirk.pdf)

Discussion

Nafeez Ahmed:

"As system theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon has shown in his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, natural and evolutionary processes reveal that breakdown can be a precursor to revitalization. But that requires fundamental systemic transformation: overcoming internal system dynamics that no longer work, breaking out of the old mold, while embracing and creating from within a new system, with new rules, new dynamics, and new vision." (http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/paris-attacks-and-climate-change-push-us-to-fix-a-world-of-broken-systems-20151119)